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discussed in biography

Tootsie (1982) was one of the highlights of Pollack’s career, a blend of romance and comedy built around the talents of Dustin Hoffman, who played a struggling actor who turns to cross-dressing in order to land a role on a soap opera. The Academy Award-nominated film featured strong performances by Jessica Lange (who won an Oscar), Bill Murray, Dabney Coleman, Teri...

drag queens

...That Lemmon and Curtis did drag on-screen hardly makes them drag queens, though the effect is the same: gender norms are radically undone when drag takes place. As with the movie
Tootsie(1982), one Hollywood theme that allowed for the popularization of drag queens is the idea that men only dress like ladies to get the girl. In contrast, a film like Alfred Hitchcock’s...

Hoffman

...finally won a best actor award for his sympathetic portrayal of a divorced single father in
Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and earned another nomination for
Tootsie (1982), in which he played an out-of-work actor who, while masquerading as a woman, finds steady employment on a daytime soap opera.

Lange

...she starred as the gifted but doomed actress Frances Farmer. The emotionally draining role almost led to a breakdown, but Lange found comic relief in the gender-bending farce
Tootsie, playing a vulnerable soap opera actress. She earned Academy Award nominations for both films and was named best supporting actress for
Tootsie.